So as a service to my fellow townsfolk, I have decided to derive from first principles the number of scum which are participating in this game. As I am sure my conclusions will shock and amaze all of you, I advocate that you read on and see exactly the magnitude of the task set before us.
For starters, this is a game of thirteen participants, not counting our esteemed game master Chronos. Clearly, by the rules of the game, any number of villains participating greater than six would end the game immediately. Since Chronos has not announced the end of the game as soon as it started, we can conclude that there are six or fewer scum in this game.
So could the number of scum be six? Having a number that large would be risky for the purpose of the game. Indeed, one bad early lynching decision could end the game on this act, and never give the villains a chance to make a kill of their own. Even scum would have blown the whistle if this had happened, because they certainly would get no enjoyment out of the game if they didn’t even get to make a meaningful action. So six is out.
Five scum, then? There is a slight possibility of this, but I discount it for much the same reason as given above. One bad lynching call puts the townspeople into the danger zone, where any further error makes the game end in a hurry. With the tremendous investment in time that our GM has made in setting this up, we can again discount five villains in the same way that we discounted six.
So, four villains? We are getting into the most likely part of the solution space. But there is something to point out as well here. We have already heard in this thread that most experts recommend using the square root of the number of participants for the number of villains. But our GM specifically wanted at least 13 (or 16) players. I could imagine 16, as the square root gives us a nice easy 4 villains in that case. But what we have is 13. That creates an irrational number for its square root, and its decimal representation is just over 3.60. Rounding up to 4 would obviously handicap the townspeople too much, but rounding down to 3 would be farther from the ideal than 4 would be. And, in keeping with the class of the number, it would be completely irrational to have approximately six-tenths of one participant serve as scum, while the other four-tenths of that person was a townsperson - even if a participant did have the dissociative identity disorder required to assume that role. All this allows us to eliminate both four and three as the number of villains.
So is it possible there two scum in this game? Very unlikely. Consider that our GM specifically stated that there was a group chat set up for the members of the villain community. If there are but two members, would a group chat be necessary? Clearly not! Rather, he would just have them PM one another, for any coordination needed. This is also the case if there is just one scum. Doing extra unneeded work would be antithetical to the ethos of the game, so we can conclude that there is neither two nor one scum.
Therefore, by the flawless reasoning exhibited above, we can conclude that there are in fact ZERO villains in this game. But, you may ask, does this not mean that the game would be declared over as soon as is starts? Perhaps not. While looking up rules, I noticed that the townie win condition was given as “the townies when when the number of scum drops to zero”. Notice that phrasing - how can the condition occur when the number of scum is already at zero? “Drop(ping) to zero” cannot happen when it already starts at that level.
So why would our GM do this to us - run an entire signup to have a game with no villains and no ending? I suggest two possible motivations. One would be that this a work of performance art, an Andy Kaufmanesque source of amusement for the folks following along in the spectator’s thread. The other possibility is that this is part of a psychological experiment, almost a latter-day Stanford Prison experiment, only akin to the classic Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” where the payoff will be to see if we dissolve into a morass of recriminations and backbiting.
tl;dr WE’RE BEING PLAYED, SHEEPLE!
, but I haven’t played Mafia for over 10 years, so it was a genuine attempt to find out what I should be doing.
(i.e. Town and Villain.)